Chapter IV: , VII (1)

Cade and his rebels took possession of London; but they were
beaten in a battle and forced to quit the city. Cade and some
followers continued to be turbulent and soon afterwards he was
killed.

_J. Gairdner,
Houses of Lancaster and York,
chapter 7, section 6._

ALSO IN:
_C. M. Yonge,
Cameos from English History,
3d series, chapter 7._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1455.
Demoralized state of the nation.
Effects of the wars in France.

"The whole picture of the times is very depressing on the
moral if not on the material side. There are few more pitiful
episodes in history than the whole tale of the reign of Henry
VI., the most unselfish and well-intentioned king that ever
sat upon the English throne—a man of whom not even his
enemies and oppressors could find an evil word to say; the
troubles came, as they confessed, 'all because of his false
lords, and never of him.' We feel that there must have been
something wrong with the heart of a nation that could see
unmoved the meek and holy king torn from wife and child, sent
to wander in disguise up and down the kingdom for which he had
done his poor best, and finally doomed to pine for five years a
prisoner in the fortress where he had so long held his royal
Court. Nor is our first impression concerning the
demoralisation of England wrong. Every line that we read bears
home to us more and more the fact that the nation had fallen
on evil times. First and foremost among the causes of its
moral deterioration was the wretched French War, a war begun
in the pure spirit of greed and ambition,—there was not even
the poor excuse that had existed in the time of Edward
III.—carried on by the aid of hordes of debauched foreign
mercenaries … and persisted in long after it had become
hopeless, partly from misplaced national pride, partly because
of the personal interests of the ruling classes. Thirty-five
years of a war that was as unjust as it was unfortunate had
both soured and demoralised the nation. … When the final
catastrophe came and the fights of Formigny [or Fourmigny] and
Chatillon [Castillon] ended the chapter of our disasters, the
nation began to cast about for a scapegoat on whom to lay the
burden of its failures. … At first the unfortunate Suffolk
and Somerset had the responsibility laid upon them. A little
later the outcry became more bold and fixed upon the
Lancastrian dynasty itself as being to blame not only for
disaster abroad, but for want of governance at home. If King
Henry had understood the charge, and possessed the wit to
answer it, he might fairly have replied that his subjects must
fit the burden upon their own backs, not upon his. The war had
been weakly conducted, it was true; but weakly because the men
and money for it were grudged. … At home, the bulwarks of
social order seemed crumbling away. Private wars, riot, open
highway robbery, murder, abduction, armed resistance to the
law, prevailed on a scale that had been unknown since the
troublous times of Edward II.—we might almost say since the
evil days of Stephen. But it was not the Crown alone that
should have been blamed for the state of the realm. The nation
had chosen to impose over-stringent constitutional checks on
the kingly power before it was ripe for self-government, and
the Lancastrian house sat on the throne because it had agreed
to submit to those checks. If the result of the experiment was
disastrous, both parties to the contract had to bear their
share of the responsibility. But a nation seldom allows that
it has been wrong; and Henry of Windsor had to serve as a
scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the realm, because Henry
of Bolingbroke had committed his descendants to the unhappy
compact. Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly
the complaint under which England was labouring in the middle
of the 15th century, and all the grievances against which
outcry was made were but symptoms of one latent disease. …
All these public troubles would have been of comparatively
small importance if the heart of the nation had been sound.
The phenomenon which makes the time so depressing is the
terrible decay in private morals since the previous century.
… There is no class or caste in England which comes well out
of the scrutiny. The Church, which had served as the conscience
of the nation in better times, had become dead to spiritual
things. It no longer produced either men of saintly life or
learned theologians or patriotic statesmen. … The baronage
of England had often been unruly, but it had never before
developed the two vices which distinguished it in the times of
the Two Roses—a taste for indiscriminate bloodshed and a turn
for political apostacy. … Twenty years spent in contact with
French factions, and in command of the godless mercenaries who
formed the bulk of the English armies, had taught our nobles
lessons of cruelty and faithlessness such as they had not
before imbibed. … The knights and squires showed on a
smaller scale all the vices of the nobility. Instead of
holding together and maintaining a united loyalty to the
Crown, they bound themselves by solemn sealed bonds and the
reception of 'liveries' each to the baron whom he preferred.
This fatal system, by which the smaller landholder agreed on
behalf of himself and his tenants to follow his greater
neighbour in peace and war, had ruined the military system of
England, and was quite as dangerous as the ancient feudalism.
… If the gentry constituted themselves the voluntary
followers of the baronage, and aided their employers to keep
England unhappy, the class of citizens and burgesses took a
very different line of conduct. If not actively mischievous,
they were solidly inert. They refused to entangle themselves
in politics at all. They submitted impassively to each ruler
in turn, when they had ascertained that their own persons and
property were not endangered by so doing. A town, it has been
remarked, seldom or never stood a siege during the Wars of the
Roses, for no town ever refused to open its gates to any
commander with an adequate force who asked for entrance."

_C. W. Oman,
Warwick the King-maker,
chapter 1._

{820}

ENGLAND: A. D. 1455-1471.
The Wars of the Roses.

Beginning with a battle fought at St. Albans on the 23d of
May, 1455, England was kept in a pitiable state of civil war,
with short intervals of troubled peace, during thirty years.
The immediate cause of trouble was in the feebleness of King
Henry VI., who succeeded to the throne while an infant, and
whose mind, never strong, gave way under the trials of his
position when he came to manhood. The control of the
government, thus weakly commanded, became a subject of strife
between successive factions. The final leaders in such
contests were Queen Margaret of Anjou, the energetic consort
of the helpless king (with the king himself sometimes in a
condition of mind to cooperate with her), on one side, and, on
the other side, the Duke of York, who traced his lineage to
Edward III., and who had strong claims to the throne if Henry
should leave no heir. The battle at St. Albans was a victory
for the Yorkists and placed them in power for the next two
years, the Duke of York being named Protector. In 1456 the
king recovered so far as to resume the reigns of government,
and in 1459 there was a new rupture between the factions. The
queen's adherents were beaten in the battle of Bloreheath,
September 23d of that year; but defections in the ranks of the
Yorkists soon obliged the latter to disperse and their
leaders, York, Warwick and Salisbury, fled to Ireland and to
Calais. In June, 1460, the earls of Warwick, Salisbury and
March (the latter being the eldest son of the Duke of York)
returned to England and gathered an army speedily, the city of
London opening its gates to them. The king's forces were
defeated at Northampton (July 10) and the king taken prisoner.
A parliament was summoned and assembled in October. Then the Duke
of York came over from Ireland, took possession of the royal
palace and laid before parliament a solemn claim to the crown.
After much discussion a compromise was agreed upon, under
which Henry VI. should reign undisturbed during his life and
the Duke of York should be his undisputed successor. This was
embodied in an act of parliament and received the assent of
the king; but queen Margaret who had retired into the north,
refused to surrender the rights of her infant son, and a
strong party sustained her. The Duke of York attacked these
Lancastrian forces rashly, at Wakefield, December 30, 1460, and
was slain on the field of a disastrous defeat. The queen's
army, then, marching towards London, defeated the Earl of
Warwick at St. Albans, February 17, 1461 (the second battle of
the war at that place), and recovered possession of the person
of the king. But Edward, Earl of March (now become Duke of
York, by the death of his father), who had just routed a
Lancastrian force at Mortimer's Cross, in Wales, joined his
forces with those of Warwick and succeeded in occupying
London, which steadily favored his cause. Calling together a
council of lords, Edward persuaded them to declare King Henry
deposed, on the ground that he had broken the agreement made
with the late Duke of York. The next step was to elect Edward
king, and he assumed the royal title and state at once. The
new king lost no time in marching northwards against the army
of the deposed sovereign, which lay near York. On the 27th of
March the advanced division of the Lancastrians was defeated
at Ferrybridge, and, two days later, their main body was
almost destroyed in the fearful battle of Towton,—said to
have been the bloodiest encounter that ever took place on
English soil. King Henry took refuge in Scotland and Queen
Margaret repaired to France. In 1464 Henry reappeared in the
north with a body of Scots and refugees and there were risings
in his favor in Northumberland, which the Yorkists crushed in
the successive battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham. The
Yorkist king (Edward IV.) now reigned without much disturbance
ntil 1470, when he quarreled with the powerful Earl of Warwick—
the "king-maker," whose strong hand had placed him on the
throne. Warwick then passed to the other side, offering his
services to Queen Margaret and leading an expedition which
sailed from Harfleur in September, convoyed by a French fleet.
Edward found himself unprepared to resist the Yorkist risings
which welcomed Warwick and he fled to Holland, seeking aid
from his brother-in-law, the Duke of Burgundy. For nearly six
months, the kingdom was in the hands of Warwick and the
Lancastrians; the unfortunate Henry VI., released from
captivity in the Tower, was once more seated on the throne.
But on the 14th of March, 1471, Edward reappeared in England,
landing at Ravenspur, professing that he came only to recover
his dukedom of York. As he moved southwards he gathered a
large force of supporters and soon reassumed the royal title
and pretensions. London opened its gates to him, and, on the
14th of April—exactly one month after his landing—he
defeated his opponents at Barnet, where Warwick, "the
king-maker"—the last of the great feudal barons—was slain.
Henry, again a captive, was sent back to the Tower. But
Henry's dauntless queen, who landed at Weymouth, with a body
of French allies on the very day of the disastrous Barnet
fight, refused to submit. Cornwall and Devon were true to her
cause and gave her an army with which she fought the last
battle of the war at Tewksbury on the 4th of May. Defeated and
taken prisoner, her young son slain—whether in the battle or
after it is unknown—the long contention of Margaret of Anjou
ended on that bloody field. A few days later, when the
triumphant Yorkist King Edward entered London, his poor,
demented Lancastrian rival died suddenly and suspiciously in
the Tower. The two parties in the long contention had each
assumed the badge of a rose—the Yorkists a white rose, the
Lancastrians a red one. Hence the name of the Wars of the
Roses. "As early as the time of John of Ghent, the rose was
used as an heraldic emblem, and when he married Blanche, the
daughter of the Duke of Lancaster, he used the red rose for a
device. Edmund of Langley, his brother, the fifth son of
Edward III., adopted the white rose in opposition to him; and
their followers afterwards maintained these distinctions in
the bloody wars of the fifteenth century. There is, however,
no authentic account of the precise period when these badges
were first adopted."

_Mrs. Hookham,
Life and Times of Margaret of Anjou,
volume 2, chapter 1._

ALSO IN:
_J. Gairdner,
Houses of Lancaster and York._

_Sir J. Ramsay,
Lancaster and York._

_C. W. Oman;
Warwick, the King-maker,
chapter 5-17._

See, also,
TOWTON, BARNET, and TEWKSBURY.

{821}

The effects of the Wars of the Roses.

"It is astonishing to observe the rapidity with which it [the
English nation] had settled down to order in the reign of
Henry VII. after so many years of civil dissension. It would
lead us to infer that those wars were the wars of a class, and
not of the nation; and that the effects of them have been
greatly exaggerated. With the single exception of Cade's
rebellion, they had nothing in common with the revolutions of
later or earlier times. They were not wars against classes,
against forms of government, against the order or the
institutions of the nation. It was the rivalry of two
aristocratic factions struggling for superiority, neither of
them hoping or desiring, whichever obtained the upper hand, to
introduce momentous changes in the State or its
administration. The main body of the people took little
interest in the struggle; in the towns at least there was no
intermission of employment. The war passed over the nation,
ruffling the surface, toppling down high cliffs here and
there, washing away ancient landmarks, attracting the
imagination of the spectator by the mightiness of its waves,
and the noise of its thunders; but the great body below the
surface remained unmoved. No famines, no plagues, consequent
on the intermittance of labour caused by civil war, are
recorded; even the prices of land and provisions scarcely
varied more than they have been known to do in times of
profoundest peace. But the indirect and silent operation of
these conflicts was much more remarkable. It reft into
fragments the confederated ranks of a powerful territorial
aristocracy, which had hitherto bid defiance to the King,
however popular, however energetic. Henceforth the position of
the Sovereign in the time of the Tudors, in relation to all
classes of the people, became very different from what it had
been; the royal supremacy was no longer a theory; but a fact.
Another class had sprung up on the decay of the ancient
nobility. The great towns had enjoyed uninterrupted
tranquility, and even flourished, under the storm that was
scourging the aristocracy and the rural districts. Their
population had increased by numbers whom fear or the horrors
of war had induced to find shelter behind stone walls. The
diminution of agricultural labourers converted into soldiers
by the folly of their lords had turned corn-lands into
pasture, requiring less skill, less capital, and less labour."

_J. S. Brewer,
The Reign of Henry VIII.,
volume 1, chapter 2._

"Those who would estimate the condition of England aright
should remember that the War of the Roses was only a
repetition on a large scale of those private wars which
distracted almost every county, and, indeed, by taking away
all sense of security, disturbed almost every manor and every
class of society during the same century. … The lawless
condition of English society in the 15th century resembled
that of Ireland in as recent a date as the beginning of the
19th century. … In both countries women were carried off,
sometimes at night; they were first violated, then dragged to
the altar in their night-dress and compelled to marry their
captors. … Children were seized and thrown into a dungeon
until ransomed by their parents."

_W. Denton,
England in the 15th Century,
chapter 3._

"The Wars of the Roses which filled the second half of the
15th century furnished the barons with an arena in which their
instincts of violence had freer play than ever; it was they
who, under the pretext of dynastic interests which had ceased
to exist, of their own free choice prolonged the struggle.
Altogether unlike the Italian condottieri, the English barons
showed no mercy to their own order; they massacred and
exterminated each other freely, while they were careful to
spare the commonalty. Whole families were extinguished or
submerged in the nameless mass of the nation, and their
estates by confiscation or escheat helped to swell the royal
domain. When Henry VII. had stifled the last movements of
rebellion and had punished, through the Star Chamber, those
nobles who were still suspected of maintaining armed bands,
the baronage was reduced to a very low ebb; not more than
twenty-nine lay peers were summoned by the king to his first
Parliament. The old Norman feudal nobility existed no longer;
the heroic barons of the great charter barely survived in the
persons of a few doubtful descendants; their estates were
split up or had been forfeited to the Crown. A new class came
forward to fill the gap, that rural middle class which was
formed … by the fusion of the knights with the free
landowners. It had already taken the lead in the House of
Commons, and it was from its ranks that Henry VII. chose
nearly all the new peers. A peerage renewed almost throughout,
ignorant of the habits and traditions of the earlier nobility,
created in large batches, closely dependent on the monarch who
had raised it from little or nothing and who had endowed it
with his bounty—this is the phenomenon which confronts us at
the end of the fifteenth century."

_E. Boutmy,
The English Constitution,
chapter 5._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1461.
Accession of King Edward IV.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1461-1485.
House of York.

The House of York, which triumphed in the Wars of the Roses,
attaining the throne in the person of Edward IV. (A. D. 1461),
derived its claim to the crown through descent, in the female
line, from Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the third son of Edward
III. (the second son who lived to manhood and left children);
while the House of Lancaster traced its lineage to John of
Gaunt, a younger son of the same king Edward III., but the
line of Lancastrian succession was through males. "Had the
crown followed the course of hereditary succession, it would
have devolved on the posterity of Lionel. … By the decease
of that prince without male issue, his possessions and
pretensions fell to his daughter Philippa, who by a singular
combination of circumstances had married Roger Mortimer earl
of March, the male representative of the powerful baron who
was attainted and executed for the murder of Edward II., the
grandfather of the duke of Clarence. The son of that potent
delinquent had been restored to his honours and estates at an
advanced period in the reign of Edward III. … Edmund, his
grandson, had espoused Philippa of Clarence. Roger Mortimer,
the fourth in descent from the regicide, was lord lieutenant
of Ireland and was considered, or, according to some writers,
declared to be heir of the crown in the early part of
Richard's reign. Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, in whom the
hereditary claim to the crown was vested at the deposition of
Richard, was then only an infant of ten years of age. …
{822}
Dying without issue, the pretensions to the crown, which he
inherited through the duke of Clarence, devolved on his sister
Anne Mortimer, who espoused Richard of York earl of Cambridge,
the grandson of Edward III. by his fourth [fifth] son Edmund
of Langley duke of York." Edward IV. was the grandson of this
Anne Mortimer and Richard of York.

_Sir J. Mackintosh,
History of England,
volume 1, pages 338-339._

The House of York occupied the throne but twenty-four years.
On the death of Edward IV., in 1483, the crown was secured by
his brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who caused Edward's
two sons to be murdered in the Tower. The elder of these
murdered princes is named in the list of English kings as
Edward V.; but he cannot be said to have reigned. Richard III.
was overthrown and slain on Bosworth field in 1485.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1471-1485.
The New Monarchy.
The rise of Absolutism and the decline of Parliamentary
government.

"If we use the name of the New Monarchy to express the
character of the English sovereignty from the time of Edward
IV. to the time of Elizabeth, it is because the character of
the monarchy during this period was something wholly new in
our history. There is no kind of sibilantly between the
kingship of the Old English, of the Norman, the Angevin, or
the Plantagenet sovereigns, and the kingship of the Tudors.
… What the Great Rebellion in its final result actually did
was to wipe away every trace of the New Monarchy, and to take
up again the thread of our political development just where it
had been snapped by the Wars of the Roses. … The founder of
the New Monarchy was Edward IV. … While jesting with
aldermen, or dallying with his mistresses, or idling over the
new pages from the printing press [Caxton's] at Westminster,
Edward was silently laying the foundations of an absolute rule
which Henry VII. did little more than develop and consolidate.
The almost total discontinuance of Parliamentary life was in
itself a revolution. Up to this moment the two Houses had
played a part which became more and more prominent in the
government of the realm. … Under Henry VI. an important step
in constitutional progress had been made by abandoning the old
form of presenting the requests of the Parliament in the form
of petitions which were subsequently moulded into statutes by
the Royal Councils; the statute itself, in its final form, was
now presented for the royal assent, and the Crown was deprived
of its former privilege of modifying it. Not only does this
progress cease, but the legislative activity of Parliament
itself comes abruptly to an end. … The necessity for
summoning the two Houses had, in fact, been removed by the
enormous tide of wealth which the confiscation of the civil
war poured into the royal treasury. … It was said that
nearly a fifth of the land had passed into the royal
possession at one period or another of the civil war. Edward
added to his resources by trading on a vast scale. … The
enterprises he had planned against France … enabled Edward
not only to increase his hoard, but to deal a deadly blow at
liberty. Setting aside the usage of loans sanctioned by the
authority of Parliament, Edward called before him the
merchants of the city and requested from each a present or
benevolence in proportion to the need. Their compliance with
his prayer was probably aided by his popularity with the
merchant class; but the system of benevolence was soon to be
developed into the forced loans of Wolsey and the ship-money
of Charles I."

_J. R. Green,
Short History of the English People,
chapter 6, section 3._

ALSO IN:
_W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
chapter 18, section 696._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1474.
Treaty with the Hanseatic League.

See HANSA TOWNS.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1476.
Introduction of Printing by Caxton.

See PRINTING, &c.: A. D. 1476-1491.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1483-1485.
Murder of the young king, Edward V.
Accession of Richard III.
The battle of Bosworth and the fall of the House of York.

On the death of Edward IV., in 1483, his crafty and
unscrupulous brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, gathered
quickly into his hands the reins of power, proceeding with
consummate audacity and ruthlessness to sweep every strong
rival out of his path. Contenting himself for a few weeks,
only, with the title of Protector, he soon disputed the
validity of his brother Edward's marriage, caused an
obsequious Parliament to set aside the young sons whom the
latter had left, declaring them to be illegitimate, and placed
the crown on his own head. The little princes (King Edward V.,
and Richard, Duke of York), immured in the Tower, were
murdered presently at their uncle's command, and Richard III.
appeared, for the time, to have triumphed in his ambitious
villainy. But, popular as he made himself in many cunning
ways, his deeds excited a horror which united Lancastrians
with the party of York in a common detestation. Friends of
Henry, Earl of Richmond, then in exile, were not slow to take
advantage of this feeling. Henry could claim descent from the
same John of Gaunt, son of Edward III., to whom the House of
Lancaster traced its lineage; but his family—the
Beauforts—sprang from the mistress, not the wife, of the
great Duke of Lancaster, and had only been legitimated by act
of Parliament. The Lancastrians, however, were satisfied with
the royalty of his blood, and the Yorkists were made content
by his promise to marry a daughter of Edward IV. On this
understanding being arranged, Henry came over from Brittany to
England, landing at Milford Haven on the 7th or 8th of August,
1485, and advancing through Wales, being joined by great
numbers as he moved. Richard, who had no lack of courage,
marched quickly to meet him, and the two forces joined battle
on Bosworth Field, in Leicestershire, on Sunday, August 21. At
the outset of the fighting Richard was deserted by a large
division of his army and saw that his fate was sealed. He
plunged, with despairing rage, into the thickest of the
struggle and was slain. His crowned helmet, which he had worn,
was found by Sir Reginald Bray, battered and broken, under a
hawthorn bush, and placed on the head of his rival, who soon
attained a more solemn coronation, as Henry VII.

_C. M. Yonge,
Cameos from English History,
3d Series, chapters 19-20._

"I must record my impression that a minute study of the facts
of Richard's life has tended more and more to convince me of
the general fidelity of the portrait with which we have been
made familiar by Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More. I feel quite
ashamed, at this day, to think how I mused over this subject
long ago, wasting a great deal of time, ink and paper, in
fruitless efforts to satisfy even my own mind that traditional
black was real historical white, or at worst a kind of grey.
…
{823}
Both the character and personal appearance of Richard III.
have furnished matter of controversy. But with regard to the
former the day has now gone by when it was possible to doubt
the evidence at least of his principal crime; and that he was
regarded as a tyrant by his subjects seems almost equally
indisputable. At the same time he was not destitute of better
qualities. … As king he seems really to have studied his
country's welfare, passed good laws, endeavoured to put an end
to extortion, declined the free gifts offered to him by
several towns, and declared he would rather have the hearts of
his subjects than their money. His munificence was especially
shown in religious foundations. … His hypocrisy was not of
the vulgar kind which seeks to screen habitual baseness of
motive by habitual affectation of virtue. His best and his
worst deeds were alike too well known to be either concealed
or magnified; at least, soon after he became king, all doubt
upon the subject must have been removed. … His ingratiating
manners, together with the liberality of his disposition, seem
really to have mitigated to a considerable extent the alarms
created by his fitful deeds of violence. The reader will not
require to be reminded of Shakespeare's portrait of a murderer
who could cajole the woman whom he had most exasperated and
made a widow into marrying himself. That Richard's ingenuity
was equal to this extraordinary feat we do not venture to
assert; but that he had a wonderful power of reassuring those
whom he had most intimidated and deceiving those who knew him
best there can be very little doubt. … His taste in building
was magnificent and princely. … There is scarcely any
evidence of Richard's [alleged] deformity to be derived from
original portraits. The number of portraits of Richard which
seem to be contemporary is greater than might have been
expected. … The face in all the portraits is a remarkable
one, full of energy and decision, yet gentle and sad-looking,
suggesting the idea not so much of a tyrant as of a mind
accustomed to unpleasant thoughts. Nowhere do we find depicted
the warlike hard-favoured visage attributed to him by Sir
Thomas More. … With such a one did the long reign of the
Plantagenets terminate. The fierce spirit and the valour of
the race never showed more strongly than at the close. The
Middle Ages, too, as far as England was concerned, may be said
to have passed away with Richard III."

_J. Gairdner,
History of the Life, and Reign of Richard The Third,
introduction and chapter 6._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1485.
Accession of King Henry VII.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1485-1528.
The Sweating Sickness.

See SWEATING SICKNESS.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1485-1603.
The Tudors.

The Tudor family, which occupied the English throne from the
accession of Henry VII., 1485, until the death of Elizabeth,
1603, took its name, but not its royal lineage, from Sir Owen
Tudor, a handsome Welsh chieftain, who won the heart and the
hand of the young widow of Henry V., Catherine of France. The
eldest son of that marriage, made Earl of Richmond, married in
his turn Margaret Beaufort, great-granddaughter to John of
Gaunt, or Ghent, who was one of the sons of Edward III. From
this latter union came Henry of Richmond, as he was known, who
disputed the crown with Richard III. and made his claim good
on Bosworth Field, where the hated Richard was killed. Henry's
pretensions were based on the royal descent of his
mother—derived, however, through John of Gaunt's mistress—
and the dynasty which he founded was closely related in origin
to the Lancastrian line. Henry of Richmond strengthened his
hold upon the crown, though not his title to it, by marrying
Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV., thus joining the white rose
to the red. He ascended the throne as Henry VII., A. D. 1485;
was succeeded by his son, Henry VIII., in 1509, and the latter
by his three children, in order as follows: Edward VI., 1547;
Mary, 1553; Elizabeth, 1558. The Tudor family became extinct
on the death of Queen Elizabeth, in 1603. "They [the Tudors]
reigned in England, without a successful rising against them,
for upwards of a hundred years; but not more by a studied
avoidance of what might so provoke the country, than by the
most resolute repression of every effort, on the part of what
remained of the peerage and great families, to make head
against the throne. They gave free indulgence to their tyranny
only within the circle of the court, while they unceasingly
watched and conciliated the temper of the people. The work
they had to do, and which by more scrupulous means was not
possible to be done, was one of paramount necessity; the
dynasty uninterruptedly endured for only so long as was
requisite to its thorough completion; and to each individual
sovereign the particular task might seem to have been
specially assigned. It was Henry's to spurn, renounce and
utterly cast off, the Pope's authority, without too suddenly
revolting the people's usages and habits; to arrive at blessed
results by ways that a better man might have held to be
accursed; during the momentous change in progress to keep in
necessary check both the parties it affected; to persecute
with an equal hand the Romanist and the Lutheran; to send the
Protestant to the stake for resisting Popery, and the Roman
Catholic to the scaffold for not admitting himself to be Pope;
while he meantime plundered the monasteries, hunted down and
rooted out the priests, alienated the abbey lands, and glutted
himself and his creatures with that enormous spoil. It was
Edward's to become the ready and undoubting instrument of
Cranmer's design, and, with all the inexperience and more than
the obstinacy of youth, so to force upon the people his
compromise of doctrine and observance, as to render possible,
even perhaps unavoidable, his elder sister's reign. It was
Mary's to undo the effect of that precipitate eagerness of the
Reformers, by lighting the fires of Smithfield; and
opportunely to arrest the waverers from Protestantism, by
exhibiting in their excess the very worst vices, the cruel
bigotry, the hateful intolerance, the spiritual slavery, of
Rome. It was Elizabeth's finally and forever to uproot that
slavery from amongst us, to champion all over the world a new
and nobler faith, and immovably to establish in England the
Protestant religion."

_J. Forster,
Historical and Biographical Essays,
pages 221-222._

ALSO IN:
_S. R. Gardiner and J. B. Mullinger,
Introduction to the Study of English History,
chapter 6._

_C. E. Moberly,
The Early Tudors._

{824}

ENGLAND: A. D. 1487-1497.
The Rebellions of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

Although Henry VII., soon after he attained the throne,
married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV., and thus
united the two rival houses, the Yorkists were discontented
with his rule. "With the help of Margaret of Burgundy, Edward
IV. 's sister, and James IV. of Scotland, they actually set up
two impostors, one after the other, to claim the throne. There
was a real heir of the House of York still alive—young
Edward, Earl of Warwick [son of the Duke of Clarence, brother
to Edward IV.], … and Henry had taken the precaution to
keep him in the Tower. But in 1487 a sham Earl of Warwick
appeared in Ireland, and being supported by the Earl of
Kildare, was actually crowned in Dublin Cathedral. Henry soon
put down the imposture by showing the real earl to the people
of London, and defeating the army of the pretended earl at
Stoke, near Newark, June, 1487. He proved to be a lad named
Lambert Simnel, the son of a joiner at Oxford, and he became a
scullion in the king's kitchen." In 1492 another pretender of
like character was brought forward. "A young man, called
Perkin Warbeck, who proved afterwards to be a native of
Tournay, pretended that he was Richard, Duke of York, the
younger of the two little princes in the Tower, and that he
had escaped when his brother Edward V. was murdered. He
persuaded the king of France and Margaret of Burgundy to
acknowledge him, and was not only received at the foreign
courts, but, after failing in Ireland, he went to Scotland,
where James IV. married him to his own cousin Catharine
Gordon, and helped him to invade England in 1496. The invasion
was defeated however, by the Earl of Surrey, and then Perkin
went back to Ireland, where the people had revolted against
the heavy taxes. There he raised an army and marched to
Exeter, but meeting the king's troops at Taunton, he lost
courage, and fled to the Abbey of Beaulieu, where he was taken
prisoner, and sent to the Tower in 1497." In 1501 both Perkin
Warbeck and the young Earl of Warwick were executed.

_A. B. Buckley,
History of England for Beginners,
chapter 13._

ALSO IN:
_J. Gairdner,
Story of Perkin Warbeck
(appendix to Life of Richard III.)._

_C. M. Yonge,
Cameos from English History,
3d series, chapters 21 and 24._

_J. Gairdner,
Henry VII.,
chapters 4 and 7._

ENGLAND: 15th-16th Centuries.
The Renaissance.
Life in "Merry England."
Preludes to the Elizabethan Age of literature.

"Toward the close of the fifteenth century … commerce and
the woollen trade made a sudden advance, and such an enormous
one that corn-fields were changed into pasture-lands, 'whereby
the inhabitants of the said town (Manchester) have gotten and
come into riches and wealthy livings,' so that in 1553, 40,000
pieces of cloth were exported in English ships. It was already
the England which we see to-day, a land of meadows, green,
intersected by hedgerows, crowded with cattle, abounding in
ships, a manufacturing, opulent land, with a people of
beef-eating toilers, who enrich it while they enrich
themselves. They improved agriculture to such an extent, that
in half a century the produce of an acre was doubled. They
grew so rich, that at the beginning of the reign of Charles I.
the Commons represented three times the wealth of the Upper
House. The ruin of Antwerp by the Duke of Parma sent to
England 'the third part of the merchants and manufacturers,
who made silk, damask, stockings, taffetas, and serges.' The
defeat of the Armada and the decadence of Spain opened the
seas to their merchants. The toiling hive, who would dare,
attempt, explore, act in unison, and always with profit, was
about to reap its advantages and set out on its voyages,
buzzing over the universe. At the base and on the summit of
society, in all ranks of life, in all grades of human
condition, this new welfare became visible. … It is not when
all is good, but when all is better, that they see the bright
side of life, and are tempted to make a holiday of it. This is
why at this period they did make a holiday of it, a splendid
show, so like a picture that it fostered painting in Italy, so
like a representation, that it produced the drama in England.
Now that the battle-axe and sword of the civil wars had beaten
down the independent nobility, and the abolition of the law of
maintenance had destroyed the petty royalty of each great
feudal baron, the lords quitted their sombre castles,
battlemented fortresses, surrounded by stagnant water, pierced
with narrow windows, a sort of stone breast-plates of no use
but to preserve the life of their masters. They flock into new
palaces, with vaulted roofs and turrets, covered with
fantastic and manifold ornaments, adorned with terraces and
vast staircases, with gardens, fountains, statues, such as
were the palaces of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, half Gothic and
half Italian, whose convenience, grandeur, and beauty
announced already habits of society and the taste for
pleasure. They came to court and abandoned their old manners;
the four meals which scarcely sufficed their former voracity
were reduced to two; gentlemen soon became refined, placing
their glory in the elegance and singularity of their
amusements and their clothes. … To vent the feelings, to
satisfy the heart and eyes, to set free boldly on all the
roads of existence the pack of appetites and instincts, this
was the craving which the manners of the time betrayed. It was
'merry England,' as they called it then. It was not yet stern
and constrained. It expanded widely, freely, and rejoiced to
find itself so expanded. No longer at court only was the drama
found but in the village. Strolling companies betook
themselves thither, and the country folk supplied any
deficiencies when necessary. Shakspeare saw, before he
depicted them, stupid fellows, carpenters, joiners,
bellow-menders, play Pyramus and Thisbe, represent the lion
roaring as gently as possible, and the wall, by stretching out
their hands. Every holiday was a pageant, in which
townspeople, workmen, and children bore their parts. … A few
sectarians, chiefly in the towns and of the people, clung
gloomily to the Bible. But the court and the men of the world
sought their teachers and their heroes from pagan Greece and
Rome. About 1490 they began to read the classics; one after
the other they translated them; it was soon the fashion to
read them in the original. Elizabeth, Jane Grey, the Duchess
of Norfolk, the Countess of Arundel, many other ladies, were
conversant with Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero in the original,
and appreciated them. Gradually, by an insensible change, men
were raised to the level of the great and healthy minds who
had freely handled ideas of all kinds fifteen centuries ago.
They comprehended not only their language, but their thought;
they did not repeat lessons from, but held conversations with
them; they were their equals, and found in them intellects as
manly as their own. …
{825}
Across the train of hooded school men and sordid cavillers the
two adult and thinking ages were united, and the moderns,
silencing the infantine or snuffling voices of the middle-age,
condescended only to converse with the noble ancients. They
accepted their gods, at least they understand them, and keep
them by their side. In poems, festivals, tapestries, almost
all ceremonies they appear, not restored by pedantry merely,
but kept alive by sympathy, and glorified by the arts of an
age as flourishing and almost as profound as that of their
earliest birth. After the terrible night of the middle-age,
and the dolorous legends of spirits and the damned, it was a
delight to see again Olympus shining upon us from Greece; its
heroic and beautiful deities once more ravishing the heart of
men, they raised and instructed this young world by speaking
to it the language of passion and genius; and the age of
strong deeds, free sensuality, bold invention, had only to
follow its own bent, in order to discover in them the eternal
promoters of liberty and beauty. Nearer still was another
paganism, that of Italy; the more seductive because more
modern, and because it circulates fresh sap in an ancient
stock; the more attractive, because more sensuous and present,
with its worship of force and genius, of pleasure and
voluptuousness. … At that time Italy clearly led in every
thing, and civilisation was to be drawn thence as from its
spring. What is this civilisation which is thus imposed on the
whole of Europe, whence every science and every elegance
comes, whose laws are obeyed in every court, in which Surrey,
Sidney, Spenser, Shakspeare sought their models and their
materials? It was pagan in its elements and its birth; in its
language, which is but slightly different from Latin; in its
Latin traditions and recollections, which no gap has come to
interrupt; in its constitution, whose old municipal life first
led and absorbed the feudal life; in the genius of its race,
in which energy and enjoyment always abounded."

_H. A. Taine,
History of English Literature,
book 2, chapter 1 (volume 1)._

"The intellectual movement, to which we give the name of
Renaissance, expressed itself in England mainly through the
Drama. Other races in that era of quickened activity, when
modern man regained the consciousness of his own strength and
goodliness after centuries of mental stagnation and social
depression, threw their energies into the plastic arts and
scholarship. The English found a similar outlet for their
pent-up forces in the Drama. The arts and literature of Greece
and Rome had been revealed by Italy to Europe. Humanism had
placed the present once more in a vital relation to the past.
The navies of Portugal and Spain had discovered new continents
beyond the ocean; the merchants of Venice and Genoa had
explored the farthest East. Copernicus had revolutionised
astronomy, and the telescope was revealing fresh worlds beyond
the sun. The Bible had been rescued from the mortmain of the
Church; scholars studied it in the language of its authors,
and the people read it in their own tongue. In this rapid
development of art, literature, science, and discovery, the
English had hitherto taken but little part. But they were
ready to reap what other men had sown. Unfatigued by the
labours of the pioneer, unsophisticated by the pedantries and
sophistries of the schools, in the freshness of their youth
and vigour, they surveyed the world unfolded to them. For more
than half a century they freely enjoyed the splendour of this
spectacle, until the struggle for political and religious
liberty replunged them in the hard realities of life. During
that eventful period of spiritual disengagement from absorbing
cares, the race was fully conscious of its national
importance. It had shaken off the shackles of oppressive
feudalism, the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. It had not
yet passed under the Puritan yoke, or felt the encroachments
of despotic monarchy. It was justly proud of the Virgin Queen,
with whose idealised personality the people identified their
newly acquired sense of greatness. … What in those fifty
years they saw with the clairvoyant eyes of artists, the poets
wrote. And what they wrote, remains imperishable. It is the
portrait of their age, the portrait of an age in which
humanity stood self-revealed, a miracle and marvel to its own
admiring curiosity. England was in a state of transition when
the Drama came to perfection. That was one of those rare
periods when the past and the future are both coloured by
imagination, and both shed a glory on the present. The
medieval order was in dissolution; the modern order was in
process of formation. Yet the old state of things had not
faded from memory and usage; the new had not assumed despotic
sway. Men stood then, as it were, between two dreams—a dream
of the past, thronged with sinister and splendid
reminiscences; a dream of the future, bright with unlimited
aspirations and indefinite hopes. Neither the retreating
forces of the Middle Ages nor the advancing forces of the
modern era pressed upon them with the iron weight of
actuality. The brutalities of feudalism had been softened; but
the chivalrous sentiment remained to inspire the Surreys and
the Sidneys of a milder epoch. … What distinguished the
English at this epoch from the nations of the South was not
refinement of manners, sobriety, or self-control. On the
contrary they retained an unenviable character for more than
common savagery. … Erasmus describes the filth of their
houses, and the sicknesses engendered in their cities by bad
ventilation. What rendered the people superior to Italians and
Spaniards was the firmness of their moral fibre, the sweetness
of their humanity, a more masculine temper, less vitiated
instincts and sophisticated intellects, a law-abiding and
religious conscience, contempt for treachery and baseness,
intolerance of political or ecclesiastical despotism combined
with fervent love of home and country. They were coarse, but
not vicious; pleasure-loving, but not licentious; violent, but
not cruel; luxurious but not effeminate. Machiavelli was a
name of loathing to them. Sidney, Essex, Raleigh, More, and
Drake were popular heroes; and whatever may be thought of
these men, they certainly counted no Marquis of Pescara, no
Duke of Valentino, no Malatesta Baglioni, no Cosimo de' Medici
among them. The Southern European type betrayed itself but
faintly in politicians like Richard Cromwell and Robert
Dudley. … Affectations of foreign vices were only a
varnish on the surface of society. The core of the nation
remained sound and wholesome. Nor was the culture which the
English borrowed from less unsophisticated nations, more than
superficial. The incidents of Court gossip show how savage was
the life beneath.
{826}
Queen Elizabeth spat, in the presence of her nobles, at a
gentleman who had displeased her; struck Essex on the cheek;
drove Burleigh blubbering from her apartment. Laws in merry
England were executed with uncompromising severity. Every
township had its gallows; every village its stocks,
whipping-post and pillory. Here and there, heretics were
burned upon the market-place; and the block upon Tower Hill
was seldom dry. … Men and women who read Plato, or discussed
the elegancies of Petrarch, suffered brutal practical jokes,
relished the obscenities of jesters, used the grossest
language of the people. Carrying farms and acres on their
backs in the shape of costly silks and laces, they lay upon
rushes filthy with the vomit of old banquets. Glittering in
suits of gilt and jewelled mail, they jostled with
town-porters in the stench of the bear-gardens, or the bloody
bull-pit. The church itself was not respected. The nave of old
S. Paul's became a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes. …
It is difficult, even by noting an infinity of such
characteristics, to paint the many-coloured incongruities of
England at that epoch. Yet in the midst of this confusion rose
cavaliers like Sidney, philosophers like Bacon, poets like
Spenser; men in whom all that is pure, elevated, subtle,
tender, strong, wise, delicate and learned in our modern
civilisation displayed itself. And the masses of the people
were still in harmony with these high strains. They formed the
audience of Shakspere. They wept for Desdemona, adored Imogen,
listened with Jessica to music in the moon-light at Belmont,
wandered with Rosalind through woodland glades of Arden. Such
was the society of which our theatre became the mirror."

_J. A. Symonds,
Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama,
chapter 2, section 1, 2, and 5._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1497.
Cabot's discovery of the North American Continent.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1497.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1498.
Voyage and discoveries of Sebastian Cabot.
Ground of English claims in the New World.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1498.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1502.
The marriage which brought the Stuarts to the English throne.

See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1502.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1509.
The character and reign of Henry VII.